I purchased 2 Netgear FA311's from a local computer store because they were all out of 3Coms (my usual brand) and the blurb on the side of the box promised "Works with Linux".

Like a lot of other people I couldn't get the provided driver to work and like a lot of other people I visited http://www.scyld.com/network/, downloaded & compiled the National Semiconductor DP83815 driver, which worked fine as long as I had dynamically allocated the IP address to the card.

But the moment I give the card a fixed IP address the little tinker stops seeing the network. Curious huh?

The box is a Pentium 200MMX running HedHat 7.0 with a copy of the 2.4.2 Kernel. To be honest I'm not that bothered about using the Netgears since I managed to source a couple of 3Coms from somewhere, but I am curious to know if anyone esle has encountered the like.